CAPRON — Behind locked steel doors and fences topped with razor wire, old men sit in wheelchairs and wait for their life sentences to end.
Floyd Brown of Roanoke is one of them. He hopes it will be parole, not death, that releases him from Deerfield Correctional Center, the first prison in Virginia designated for geriatric inmates.
“I don’t know why I’m still locked up,” Brown said in a recent interview. “I paid my debt a long time ago.”
Sentenced to two life sentences plus 25 years for killing and robbing a Roanoke couple in 1973, Brown seems more senile than sinister. The 77-year-old said he was 68. He later began coughing so badly that prison officials wheeled him away.
As inmates such as Brown reach the twilight of their lives, they represent the dawn of a new age in Virginia corrections – a time when an increasing number of inmates face the prospect of growing old and dying behind bars.
Since the General Assembly voted to abolish parole in Virginia 10 years ago, the number of inmates 50 or older has more than doubled. The state was holding 3,137 such inmates at the end of the last fiscal year.
Virginia’s experience with aging inmates mirrors a national trend that runs counter to the traditional notion of prisons being the place where young men in their crime-prone years are held for society’s protection.
“When considering dangerous, violent and predatory inmates, one does not usually envision an elderly man hobbling down a prison corridor with a cane or walker,” says a report issued earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Corrections.
“However, in reality, some of the most dangerous and / or persistent criminals sentenced to life in prison without parole 30 years ago are now old, debilitated, frail, chronically ill, depressed and no longer considered a threat to society.”
In Virginia, inmates 50 or older make up just 9 percent of the prison population. Many have not reached the point where they require the services offered at Deerfield. The Department of Corrections has made no projections on growth of its geriatric population.
“It’s not an immediate concern,” said Rick Kern, executive director of the Virginia Sentencing Commission. “But it’s certainly something that should be on the radar screen.”
When it abolished parole, the General Assembly included a geriatric clause to allow the early release of elderly inmates under certain circumstances. But the Virginia Parole Board has yet to free a single inmate under the law.
Instead, the state sends them to Deerfield.
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The cluster of green-roofed buildings that sits near the North Carolina border in Southampton County was not built to be a geriatric prison.
But when the need for such a facility arose in 1999, Deerfield Correctional Center was a natural choice. The prison sits on flat ground, and its single-level buildings have no steps.
The need for such things became obvious at lunch hour during a recent visit to the prison. Younger inmates pushed wheelchair-bound prisoners across the yard to the cafeteria. Other inmates made the trip with the aid of walkers.
“Even though it is a prison, it’s not the typical prison,” Maj. S.D. Mayes said of Deerfield. “Our approach has been modified and our staff has to be more sensitive of the fact that we have aging persons, many of whom are very sickly.”
Correctional officers are trained that when an inmate refuses an order, the reason could be deafness rather than defiance. Instead of breaking up a disturbance, guards are more likely to find themselves guiding an Alzheimer’s patient back to his bunk.
Recreation time at Deerfield is more likely to involve shuffleboard and checkers than the basketball games popular at other prisons. And the exercise equipment in the gymnasium is equipped with heart monitors.
One pod of the prison is set aside for assisted living and skilled care. Many inmates held elsewhere in the prison may soon need those beds. The rest of the population consists of younger inmates to help care for the elderly.
The average age at Deerfield is 55.
While that may seem relatively young, “our 55-year-old is more like a 65- or 70-year-old, health wise, in many cases,” said Fred Schilling, director of health services for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
A lifetime of poverty, drug abuse and inadequate medical care has caught up with many inmates by the time they reach Deerfield. And then there’s the toll exacted by their current environment.
“One of the things we have certainly recognized is that prison life, in and of itself, tends to pose an additional stress on an individual that in some ways can expedite the aging process,” Mayes said.
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Compared with other lockups, Deerfield is “like a little kindergarten,” said Cordell Banks, who has seen the inside of many a prison while serving a life sentence plus 20 years for raping a Roanoke woman in 1972.
“This place, it’s not too bad,” Banks said. “But you see all the old-timers going downhill. I don’t think they’ll ever get out.”
Except for his failing eyesight, Banks, 63, is in good physical shape. He came to Deerfield as part of a “cadre” of younger inmates who hold jobs pushing wheelchairs and helping older prisoners with daily activities such as dressing and eating. The job pays $42 a week, he said.
Transferred recently from the maximum-security Keen Mountain Correctional Center, Banks was grateful to get away from the younger inmates who correctional experts say can pose a risk to older prisoners.
“Keen Mountain’s rough,” Banks said. “They’ve got all those young dudes there. They’re crazy.”
Yet Banks remains a bit uneasy about his new home.
“I see a lot more older people dying,” he said. “So that makes me a little bit nervous.”
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The average cost to keep a geriatric inmate locked up is between $60,000 and $70,000 a year, compared with about $27,000 for a general-population inmate.
That cost can vary widely depending on how many inmates become seriously ill in a given year, according to Ronald Aday, a sociology professor at Middle Tennessee State University and author of the book “Aging Prisoners: A Crisis in American Corrections.”
The expense of incarcerating senior citizens is becoming a concern for states that have passed tough sentencing laws in the past, Aday said.
“No politician ever wants to say: ‘Let’s get soft on crime,’ ” he said. “It’s always: ‘Let’s get tough and lock them up and throw the key away.’ But now the cost is so enormous, and we’ve had a downturn in the economy, and a lot of states don’t have the money anymore.”
Even though crime rates have fallen in the past 10 years, making law-and-order legislation less of the pressing issue than it once was, some say the real crunch with elderly inmates has yet to come.
Tougher laws are just one reason. As the most senior baby boomers reach their sixties, their numbers will increase both inside and outside of prisons. And Americans are living longer in general.
“All these factors are coming together at the same time,” said Aday, who expects the nation’s elderly prison population to reach a critical mass within the next 10 to 20 years.
In Virginia, it costs an average of $24,623 a year to incarcerate someone at Deerfield, according to Larry Traylor, spokesman for the Department of Corrections. The departmentwide average cost last year was $20,142.
One reason Virginia can run its geriatric prison at a cost well below the national average is that the inmates there are relatively self-sufficient, Traylor said. Deerfield does not provide care for gravely ill inmates who are close to death. In those cases, inmates are transferred to a medical unit at Greenville Correctional Center for palliative care, Traylor said.
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Even if Virginia is not spending as much as other states to hold its oldest inmates, some question the wisdom of using concrete and steel to imprison the old and feeble.
“Why do we have incarceration? If it’s simply to incapacitate people who are dangerous, it makes no sense to lock up people who are elderly and in many cases no longer a risk to society,” said David Fathi, a staff attorney with the National Prison Project in Washington D.C.
“These people . . . don’t need to be locked up, unless the purpose is purely punitive.”
Yet it was public sentiment for punitive measures that influenced the General Assembly to vote overwhelmingly to abolish parole 10 years ago.
“Indeed there are some inmates who do burn out of their criminal ways in prison, but the events that led up to 1994 were driven by parolees who were coming out of prison and committing new crimes,” said Rush Wickes, a spokesman for Virginians United Against Crime.
“The victims of crime will always have to live with the consequences,” Wickes said. “They don’t get any age-based relief.”
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There is a way out of prison for some older inmates, but so far it exists only in theory.
When the General Assembly abolished parole at a special session in 1994, it did more than give then-Gov. George Allen a victory in his campaign pledge to abolish Virginia’s “liberal, lenient parole system.” It also left a possible loophole for older inmates.
Inmates 60 or older who have served at least 10 years of their sentence, or those 65 or older who have pulled at least five years, are allowed to petition the parole board for geriatric release. The law has since been expanded to include inmates who were convicted before Jan. 1, 1995, when the no-parole laws took effect.
The parole board does not automatically review inmates for geriatric release. Prisoners must file their own petitions. About 75 requests for geriatric parole have been made since 2002.
None has been granted, said Helen Fahey, head of the parole board.
“I think it’s odd that nobody has been released,” said Jane Alford, a rehabilitation specialist in Richmond who represents inmates seeking parole. “I see that as a real problem, because we are spending big bucks on these people . . . If we’re looking to save money, that’s the population that needs to be investigated.”
Fahey cited two reasons why no one has been released under the new law: The inmates sentenced under the no-parole laws generally have not served enough time to be good candidates for geriatric release. “If you murdered someone when you were 65 years old, the fact that you are now 70 does not necessarily mean that you should be released,” she said.
As for the inmates sentenced for crimes that happened before 1995, the state already takes their age into consideration when deciding whether to grant them parole, Fahey said. More often than not, the decision is to deny parole.
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Floyd Brown is one example. He first became eligible for parole in 1987 but has been repeatedly rejected because of the serious nature of his crime.
On the night of Dec. 7, 1973, Brown decided to rob George and Louise Grissom, who were rumored to keep large amounts of cash in a safe at their home on Salem Turnpike, according to newspaper accounts at the time.
Brown recruited two of his nephews to help carry the safe. They ended up telling police how their uncle shot both victims in the head with a rifle and left the bodies in the yard of their home. Brown pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison plus 25 years.
During a brief interview last month, Brown said he still hopes to return to Roanoke, a city he has not seen since 1973. “It’s so different now, I don’t know if I’d know it,” he said.
The 77-year-old said he has family members he could stay with if he ever makes parole. His sister, who lives in Northwest Roanoke, declined to talk about the case recently.
Many times, older inmates don’t have a place to go or people to take them in. Even if they did, said Maj. Mayes of Deerfield, the long years they have spent separated from society would make for a daunting adjustment.
“You think about a person who has been locked up for 30 years, they have issues with even trying to cross a busy street,” Mayes said.
Aday, who has interviewed hundreds of elderly inmates as part of his research, said many told they would rather stay where they are than try to re-enter society at the end of their lives. “We’ve institutionalized them,” he said.
So for the likes of Floyd Brown, Deerfield is more than a prison. Said Mayes: “It gets to be home.”